The arrival of balmy summer nights in Sydney heralds with it Sport for Jove’s 17th annual outdoor season of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, kicking off at the historic Bella Vista Farm.
With the relaxed atmosphere at Bella Vista Farm aided by office closures and picnic blankets, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a few playful words from the bard wouldn’t receive immediate merriment. It came as little surprise then, that the opening night of The Comedy of Errors delivered belly laughs in abundance.
Involving not one but two sets of identical twins accidentally separated at birth, who unknowingly reunite in the Greek city of Ephesus, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors offers ludicrousness aplenty.
Centred upon Antipholus (John Panayiotis Tsakiris) and his servant Dromios (Diego Retamales), who is doubled by the visiting Antipholus of Syracuse (Kaya Byrne) and his servant Dromios of Syracuse (Gabriel Fancourt), the ridiculousness and humour escalates with each case of mistaken identity compounding the last.
Comedy of Errors review – quick links
Slapstick galore
Fancourt and Retamales each excel as the Syracusean and Ephesian iterations of Dromios, committing whole-heartedly to their performances as the archetypal, Shakespearean ‘ass’.
Battered and beaten by nearly every one of their scene partners in elaborate comic assaults – delivering endless pratfalls while flinging themselves all over the stage and offering cheeky gags like deliberately exaggerated accents, including one uncanny Trump impression, as well as a dash of toilet humour for good measure – Fancourt and Retamales embrace the obvious, low-hanging fruit of slapstick.
In lesser hands it could feel unsophisticated but their fearless physicality and unbridled joy on the stage primes the audience for laughter, making for a thoroughly riotous viewing experience.
Women talking
Sport for Jove’s production, directed by Damien Ryan and George Banders, has also accomplished an impressive reimagining of The Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, breathing new life into the source material through a renewed focus on the complexity of the play’s central female characters.
Leaning into contemporary gender politics, Ryan and Banders’ production reimagines Antipholus’ wife Adriana (Imogen Sage) and her sister Luciana (Tamara Lee Bailey) as opposing poles of modern femininity.
While Adriana remains outspoken, jealous and volatile (a familiar Shakespearean shrew by all accounts), Luciana’s contrasting championing of restraint is played out through a monologue delivered to an iPhone mounted on a ring-light tripod.
Donned in brightly coloured activewear with an obnoxiously large Stanley cup in tow, Luciana appears with an instantly recognisable, influencer-themed makeover as she extolls the virtues of staying trim, waiting on your man and embracing the values of the ‘trad-wife’.
The inclusion of a social media presence for Luciana also extends to Adriana, who repeatedly attempts to hijack Luciana’s livestream by addressing the audience behind the iPhone in order to counter Luciana’s rhetoric. In a stroke of sophisticated ingenuity, this simple adaptation allows the production to explore Adriana’s desperation to speak, to be heard and to be understood.
Foregrounding her frustration within the play’s comic machinery, Sport for Jove’s The Comedy of Errors reframes Adriana’s emotional excess not as mere farce but as a moving struggle for visibility and agency, and sets it in direct opposition to Luciana’s idealised morality – a model increasingly obsolete with the theatre-goers of today.
Refreshing and razor-sharp, the laughs derived from their dichotomy of female ideals is, in this production, inverted: Adriana-the-shrew is nuanced and sympathetic, while Luciana’s sanctimoniousness and outdated conservatism is the butt of the joke. Sage and Bailey offer uniquely powerful performances, ensuring that Shakespeare’s heroines are among the most memorable of the cast.
Utter absurdity
In a less successful experiment with the play’s treatment of women, the production also gender-swaps goldsmith Angelo to become jeweller Angela (Emily McKnight) – the purpose of which remains puzzlingly unclear.
Beyond adding yet another potential love-interest for the Antipholus twins (the fourth woman in an already confusing and complicated mix), Angela’s rewrite offers no significance beyond a few cheap innuendos and a running gag in which Adriana repeatedly mispronounces her name – ‘Spatula…I mean, Angela.’
In a play that is already as bewildering as The Comedy of Errors, the most confounding addition in Ryan and Banders’ production is an ocean-themed sequence closing out the first half. With the ensemble clad in neon and lycra mermaid or Poseidon costumes while dancing under blue disco lights, this fever dream of a scene was seemingly in service of a half-baked motif that failed to return after intermission.
Yet even perplexing creative directions such as these are testament to what makes Sport for Jove’s interpretation so effective: its willingness to fully inhabit and embrace the absurdity of Shakespeare’s play.
With The Comedy of Errors transforming what might at first seem predictable or unrefined into a vibrant, contemporary comedy that feels as fresh and new as it is funny, Sport for Jove’s 2026 season couldn’t look more promising.
Sport for Jove’s The Comedy of Errors is at Bella Vista Farm in Sydney until 28 December, before touring to Everglades Gardens in Leura from 10 to 25 January, the Blue Mountains Theatre in Springwood from 28 to 29 January, and Kooloobong Oval at the University of Wollongong from 11 to 22 February.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
